Court should not allow gene patents

6:23 PM,
Apr. 17, 2013

In this June 27 file photo, an American flag flies in front of the Supreme Court in Washington. DNA may be the building blocks of life, but can something taken from it be the building blocks of a multimillion-dollar medical monopoly?

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USA TODAY

James Watson, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the double helix structure of human DNA in 1953, was once asked whether he would patent his find. "Out of the question," he replied. And when Jonas Salk's polio vaccine electrified the nation by passing its field trials in 1955, Salk said no to a similar question, asking, "Could you patent the sun?"

That was a different era, when those who made remarkable discoveries that unlocked the secrets of the human body and promised immense benefit to mankind didn't think first of how to make a buck.